23 October 2012

It is with extreme embarassment that I admit that although I was surprised by the total lack of comments on the last few posts, I thought, 'so it goes, people are busy, it's a quiet few weeks.'

Turns out Blogger was not sending e-mail alerts for each new comment as it should, and I blithely didn't check the 'comments awaiting moderation' box.

I have thus let pile up in limbo a slew of thoughtful comments from thoughtful people. I beg your pardon for this technical bêtise; as I have mentioned before, tech is not my friend. And I shall set about reading them at once.

21 October 2012

In the U.S., as wehaveseen, Afro crime has always and everywhere been higher than Euro crime. For progressives today, the culprit in this befuddling situation is 'institutional racism.' As discrimination subsides, so the theory goes, black criminality will converge with white.

The U.S. government began its regular census of prison populations in 1926. For its first ten years, the ratio of black to white imprisonment rates looked like this:

That is, in 1930, the black imprisonment rate was 2.7 times the white rate. In a blank-slatist world, all other things being equal, this number would always be 1.

If the equalist theory holds true, then, seeing as institutional bigotry has greatly diminished in the past century, this coefficient should have already reached 1 or nearly 1. As here:

10 October 2012

We have seen how the free press in a liberal democracy can spout the reigning dogma in ways that call to mind the old Pravda or Izvestya.

The parallels do not end there. Many Westerners today have the growing sense their children's schools as well as pop culture are becoming propaganda fountains, and that questioning the orthodoxy entails real risk. Are we mad to make such comparisons? To orient ourselves, it can be helpful to look back at examples of overt scholarly and artistic indoctrination in the U.S.S.R. How near are we to them? How did we get here? What comes next?

From the time when a child can toddle, a red flag is pushed into its hand; it learns the new Soviet songs and is taught in nursery and kindergarten to lisp Soviet slogans. The stream of propaganda, all directed to the purpose of making a new type of man and woman, entirely devoted to Soviet and Communist ideas, becomes intensified as the child grows older.

No one can visit a Soviet school without being impressed bythe thorough manner in which the pupils are taught to hate "capitalism" and the "bourgeoisie" and to regard the Soviet system as the best in the world. (1)

In today's West, Great Britain has led the charge in punishing Wrongthink in its youth:

The mother of a seven-year-old boy was told to sign a school form admitting he was racist after he asked another pupil about the colour of his skin. Elliott Dearlove had asked a five-year-old boy in the playground whether he was ‘brown because he was from Africa.’

‘I was told I would have to sign a form acknowledging my son had made a racist remark which would be submitted to the local education authority for further investigation,’ she said. ‘I refused to sign it.' ... '[Elliott] kept saying to me, “I was just asking a question. I didn’t mean it to be nasty” and he was extremely distressed by it all.’

03 October 2012

Two weeks before Walter Russell Mead of The American Interest decided to shut down commenting at his blog, on a post about an Arab riot in France the following exchange took place:

'PC is intellectual Stalinism. It is also a betrayal of Liberalism in all its historical incarnations...'

'Intellectual Leninism might be a better way to characterize PC than intellectual Stalinism....Stalin just follwed suit.'

'… like reading TASS and PRAVDA, one learns to interpret what is unsaid by what IS said.'

To Right-Thinking Americans, these comparisons might sound laughable. We're a liberal democracy, after all, with the strongest free speech protections in the world. What could we have in common with an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state whose dissenters were sent to die in massive slave camps?

A better question might be, how is it possible that a liberal democracy in the 21st century is home to phenomena that so readily call to mind those of an iron-fisted one-party totalitarian state?

'Absurd,' you may say. We'd be tempted to say it ourselves. To all such people, we here at Those Who Can See can only ask: Won't you take our hand, Comrade, and come with us to the back of the four-hour toilet-paper queue as we seek out just where the parallels may lie?